The Politics of the New Yorker

Adweek.com has an interview with Michael Luo, who used to work at the New York Times and is now the editor of the New Yorker magazine's web site. The interview was interesting to me in that it openly addressed the political tilt of the magazine:

Your Condé Nast sister title Vanity Fair has been marketing itself on its anti-Trump coverage. The New Yorker is obviously an emblem of the sort of New York liberal mindset—is that something you're interested in playing up? Conversely, do you think it's important to add more conservative voices, which is something the Times has been doing?
Other people might have a better historical context, but I think that the New Yorker has become much more known for its sort of liberal take on things in the Trump era and in the digital era because we have Remnick writing pretty often, and obviously he has a point of view. Really all of our writers have a pretty strong take on incompetence and demagoguery and stuff like that. Is that something that we want to be known for? In some of the reader surveys we've seen, one of the reasons that they subscribe to The New Yorker is because it makes them feel part of this progressive community. So I think it's less of a concern for us. One thing that I think is a concern is that anti-Trump and liberal commentary can become predictable, and that's something that we need to be aware of. I think that good writing can, to a certain extent, help with that. But it also gets back to the reporting thing. If you have some reporting mixed in with that, it makes us less predictable. Is it necessary for us to have a conservative voice or something like that? We've discussed it, but I'm not sure exactly what it would look like. I think The New Yorker's niche is pretty comfortably in this progressive space and it's much less of an issue to us than it is to The New York Times.

It's interesting to me in part because the New Yorker is full of ads for consumer-facing businesses — Tiffany, Chevrolet, Citibank, Geico, Mercedes — in a way that magazines that openly tilt in the conservative direction are not. Also because of the difficulty that the editor seems to have even imagining what a conservative voice at the New Yorker "would look like."